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Wednesday Double Feature – Preprogrammed Killing Machines

by wpmorse on December 6, 2017 at 10:48 am

Posted In: Test

For this weeks my topic was… well, it’s tempting to say secret agent… or assassins or… let’s be blunt what we mean is preprogrammed killing machines.

The first film on my list, American Ultra tells the story of Mike Howell, played by a young Jesse Eisenberg he’s a nice guy, who loves his girlfriend, Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) and getting stoned and drawing cartoons in order. He’s also prone to panic attacks when he tries to leave his hometown.

One night a mysterious woman comes to the store Mike walks at and tells him some gibberish that makes no sense. Soon after some people try to kill him and he defends himself in self-defense… with a spoon.

Turns out Mike was an elite operative trained for a secret CIA program who had been hidden, and now the CIA wants to clean up the loose ends.

This was mostly just tongue and cheek adventure porn, but entertaining provided you put your suspension of disbelief away for an hour and a half. (At one point he is able to ricochet a bullet 90 degrees to end a firefight by firing at a flying frying pan.

The next film on my list Hanna tells the story our eponymous heroine played Saoirse Ronan a cute fifteen who’s been raised by her “father” Erik (played by Eric Bana) in the woods of Finland to be the perfect assassin.

Hana decides she is ready for the mission that she has been training for to kill Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) a CIA officer who has been hunting for Erik for years. They alert the CIA of their presence and Hana is captured and taken to a base in Morocco (yes really) Hana easily escapes and heads to Berlin where Erik had instructed her to meet him.

She meets up with a very nice English family along the way and befriends their very eccentric daughter Sophie (Jessica Barden). While traveling with them she begins to learn that her extensive knowledge does not include human interaction and you can’t learn everything about the world from reading encyclopedias. Will Hanna learn humanity before her cat and mouse game with Marissa ends?

I had some mixed feelings about this film. attempts to balance surrealist fairytale symbolism with a hardcore spy thriller. But it leads to some nice imagery, especially the winter scenes in the woods of Finland which have a wonderfully disorinenting timeless quality which leaves us not knowing when this takes place until Erik draws a very modern gun from his winter gear. Still, Cate Blanchett gives a wonderfully terrifying performance as Marissa.

└ Tags: Movie Reviews

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Wednesday Double Feature – Old vs New – 13 Assassins

by wpmorse on November 29, 2017 at 10:40 am

Posted In: Test

I’d recently watched Takashi Miike‘s adaptation of Blade of the Immortal, a film I enjoyed very much. A friend of mine, who is an even bigger fan of Miike’s work than I am, said this was his favorite Miike film since 13 Assassins, a film I’d heard about in passing. At about the same time, I’d heard it was a remake of an earlier film… Which led to the perfect opportunity to do another Old vs New.

Eiichi Kudo’s 1963 film, !3 Assassins tells the story of a high ranking lord who’s decedent behavior has become so terrible, he’s considered a threat to the status quo and the code of bushido. What’s worse is he’s the Shogun’s younger half-brother and is thus untouchable. In desperation, a group of officials assigns a team of assassins to go on a suicide mission to kill the Lord.

The film starts slowly with the first hour consisting of giving us all the reasons for why this assassination must take place and introducing us to the assassins. It is only in the second hour where the pace picks up, and oh boy does it pick up, culminating in the lord and his entourage of Samurai are led into a carefully modified village that has been turned into a death trap of a maze hampering the Lord’s superior numbers and giving the assassins a fighting chance.

And what a fight it is. It takes up nearly forty minutes of the film and has you sitting on your hands all the way through.

All in all, this is a fantastic film that makes complete deconstruction of bushido, showing the extremes of what the samurai do in the name of drama. From the assassins quest to kill the evil lord to a noble retainer sticking to his principals by serving the evil lord.

For the first few minutes, Miike’s 2010 version seems like a shot for shot remake but it quickly builds from the original scenes in the original movie and expanding on them. A few things are changed. For one thing, the Assassins’ target is changed from a corrupt but weak rapist to a completed monster, who after the raping a woman, kills her husband. Later we see him using a family for target practice. One wonders why the Shogun didn’t arrange a convenient accident way earlier.

Also, the film spends more time introducing us to the assassins, their plan, and their race to get to their destination before the Lord’s entourage does. It’s all very pretty benefiting greatly from a much far larger budget than the original film.

But at the same time, I think this is a problem. The final fight suffers badly from the rule of cool. Make no mistake, it is very cool but the original film made a big deal about the fight being a desperate game of cat and mouse where the heroes have to use every dirty trick in order to survive long enough to complete their mission. Everything is dependent on taking full advantage of getting the larger numbers stuck in alleyways. If one of the heroes get outnumbered they’re dead.

In Miike’s version, they pretty much throw away this tiny advantage after ten minutes and jump down to fight the enemies superior numbers, where they have the upper hand. Sure, it’s still badass but it’s just not the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN4pJ2Eu6_g

└ Tags: Movie Reviews

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Wednesday Double Features – James Bond Parodies

by wpmorse on November 22, 2017 at 9:09 am

Posted In: Test

This week I decided to entertain myself with some of the seemingly endless selection of parodies of James Bond.

The first on my list OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies had been recommended by a friend. I hadn’t heard of, though I had heard of the lead actor, Jean Dujardin, from his supporting role in Wolf of Wallstreet.

OSS is based on a series of books by Jean Bruce (sort of the way the original Casino Royal is based on Ian Fleming’s original novel.) Here the hero, French secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath / OSS 117, is a dashing credit to French manhood, popular with the ladies and good in a fight. Of course, he is also a jingoistic, sexist and racist twit, but somehow he still somehow gets the job done. He is sent to Cairo to investigate the disappearance of a fellow OSS agent as well as a Soviet Freighter (all of this takes place in the mid-fifties during the completion of the Suez canal). From here things take a turn as he makes one mishap after another in an attempt to create his mission.

This was a fun film with a great performance from Dujardin as a wonderfully self-important, oblivion ass. My favorites include his beating up a muezzin (the person who calls Muslims to prayer) who is keeping him up, oblivious to the consequences and when he takes his cover as the head of a chicken warehouse too seriously.

The best thing about it is how they take full advantage of having the film be a period piece is the number of historical in-jokes with characters looking optimistically towards things we know will fail, and how all of Hubert’s missions take place in situations that were disasters for France.

The next film I watched was Our Man Flint starring James Coburn as the title character.

The film involves a triumvirate of scientists attempts to blackmail the world by controlling a series of natural disasters to create a utopia. Desperate to stop them the government summons master spy, Derik Flint to stop them.

This was an interesting film. Instead of having the parody of James Bond, as in most of these films, Derik Flint is impossibly competent, a master of multiple martial arts, being able to stop his heart for several hours and so intelligent he is able to identify where a bouillabaisse has been made just by tasting it. For the most part, I don’t think it would have worked with anyone besides James Coburn. It’s his unflappable deadpan that makes the film work.

└ Tags: James Bond, Movie Review, Parody

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Wednesday Double Feature – Frank Sinatra Action Hero

by wpmorse on November 15, 2017 at 1:10 am

Posted In: Test

Well for this week’ selection I decided to go with films starring that legendary action hero, Frank Sinatra… yes really. Sinatra’s career in film was a lot more than just musicals. Having first only seen him in such films as Can Can and High Society, this came as a pleasant surprise to me.Especially when I saw him kick ass in The Manchurian Candidate.

The first film on my list is Ocean’s 11. Sinatra plays Danny Ocean a former paratrooper who recruits fellow members of the 82nd Airborne to rob five Las Vegas casinos during the New Years celebration. They believe that since they are not connected to the mob, they will be invisible to casino security allowing them to do their heist with military efficiency.

Ocean’s 11 is a film I’d been curious about ever seen I saw the 2001 remake starring George Clooney. Pretty much I knew about it was that it was a Rat Pack vehicle providing everybody the chance to look cool on the screen. Everything else was optional.

For the most part,I was disappointed with this film, the pacing was too slow and there was way too little payoff. I have the sneaking suspicion that it suffered from what a lot of heist films suffered from back in the day, where the censors would not allow any of these heists to be successful since that would imply crime pays.

Still, Sammy Davis Jr’s musical number was fun.

The next film on my list was the World War II film, Von Ryan’s Express. Sinatra plays Colonel Joseph Ryan who is captured in an Italian POW camp. The camp is run terribly by a sadistic and corrupt commanding officer. Because he knows allied forces are nearly a week away from taking Italy, Ryan is willing to try and cooperate with his captors, much to the rage of his fellow prisoners, earning him the nickname “Von Ryan”.

As the Italian troops retreat the prisoners are able to retreat, only to be recaptured by the Germans. However, they succeed in the transport train that is taking them north. From here they try to take the train to neutral Switzerland and escape.

This was a solid, suspenseful, film that started Sinatra’s career as a truly serious actor. It’s notable for being one of the first films where he wasn’t expected to sing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxCHiZ-UxOI

└ Tags: Frank Sinatra, Movie Reviews

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Wednesday Double Feature – Stoner Comedies

by wpmorse on November 8, 2017 at 9:00 am

Posted In: Test

Now that the Halloween season is done, I felt like I had to clear my palette from my month long horror film marathon. So I decided that something silly and innocuous would be a perfect choice. Naturally, I went with stoner comedies. Considering pot is a topic that has me at my most square, I’m not sure if this was my best idea.

Cheech and Chong kind of counts as a childhood guilty pleasure for me. At a summer camp, I went to, a friend had several of their cassette tapes so we listened to them over and over again. I still have several of their routines memorized.

I don’t think I really understood the drug culture that the two parodied and romanticized at the time. From my perspective, they were just a pair of goofballs. (I was pretty sure I was aware they were a bunch of goofballs on drugs, but because most of what I knew about marijuana came from those reefer madness drug awareness health classes from elementary school, I mostly ignored it.) I think a lot of their appeal at the time was it was something the adults wouldn’t approve of, so therefore we couldn’t get enough of it.

Besides the records, I had never seen any of Cheech and Chong’s movies so I was interested in watching their first film, Up in Smoke, directed by Lou Adler.

Up In Smoke has our pair meet up for the first time. From there, they stumble around the film looking for some weed, get chased by the police. Get sent south of the border come back driving a van made entirely of marijuana (don’t worry, it barely makes sense in context and hilarity ensues when it catches fire) and then finally entering a battle of the bands.

I’m not sure what I think of this film. It’s funny and our heroes are almost as funny as they were when I listened to the cassettes, though my sense of humor’s matured since then so that’s not quite as much of a compliment.

In a way, the movie feels about as stoned as it’s main characters. There’s an almost dreamlike quality that pervades with Cheech and Chong jumping from scene to scene with nothing mattering besides the moment.

The next film on my list was Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. The name pretty much says it all. Harold Lee and Kumar Patel played by John Cho and Kal Penn are two best friends and roommates. After recuperating from a long week with a couple of joints they get a bad case of the munchies and decide to drive to a nearby White Castle restaurant. What happens is a picaresque journey through New Jersey at the dead of the night dealing with racist cops, cheetahs and Neil Patrick Harris as Neil Patrick Harris.

I’ll be honest I never heard of White Castle until I heard of this movie.

I’m not sure just what I thought of this film. For the most part, it really depended on what scene I was watching. For the most part, I liked the more surreal scenes, such as when they find a cheetah in the woods. (Again it barely makes any more sense in context.) By the end of the film, I decided to pretend that the whole movie was a dream and our two heroes were asleep, stoned in their living room.

└ Tags: Comedy, Movie Review

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Wednesday Halloween Double Feature Haunted Houses

by wpmorse on November 1, 2017 at 9:15 am

Posted In: Test

After two weeks vampire films in a row (three if you ignore the brief respite with a week of alien invasion) I ended the Halloween season with films about haunted houses. To keep things interesting I went with two extremes from the serious to the ridiculous. They’re actually pretty similar and not just because the premise.

Starting with the ridiculous, the first film on my list was Don Knotts’ The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Knotts plays Luthor Higgs a timid man who works as a typesetter the local paper in Kansas town. He’s frequently teased by his coworkers and neighbors for his cowardice and incompetence. He dreams of becoming a real reporter. He finally gets his first lucky break when stay over night in a condemned house that is supposedly haunted. When he actually witnesses and reports on a ghostly occurrence. He becomes an instant celebrity. However the man who wants the house torn down regards this as a threat and tries to discredit Luthor.
This was… OK. Don Knotts is a very good physical comedian and every scene easy and is certainly funny however there’s not much I can really say for the rest of the film.Once you get past nights performance, there really isn’t much to this film besides cliché plot lines and running gags in an idealistic Norman Rockwell setting.

The next film on my list is the serious one. The Changeling directed by Peter Medak starring George C Scott. Scott plays John Russel a well known composer whose family is lost in a freaking car accident. In order to move on past this tragedy he moves to Seattle and rents an old mansion handled by the local historical society. The mansion turns out to be haunted by the ghost of a boy named Josef. Slowly and surely we discover with Scott the mystery of the boys death and the fact that those who benefited from his death are still out there and prospering from it… and Josef will not give Russell a moments piece until he gets his justice.

If I’d known about this for a film earlier I would’ve done it as a double feature with the Haunting last year. This was very good film and Scott was on the top of his game. It was especially cool because it was just as much a mystery as it was a horror film, with Scott slowly but surely finding out the details of Josef’s history.
Personally I thought there were some scenes where some of the musical accompaniment was not necessary. I thought that it would’ve been much creepier if it’d been left quiet with only the noise of the ghosts’ presence such as slamming doors and all the other things that we were shown.

Also, as a Seattleite I found myself noticing all of the little details about 80 Seattle, and all of the things that they did wrong with it. Most noticeably there was a scene where the antagonist is walks into the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building on Second ave then the camera pulls back and it becomes Safeco Plaza, a half mile away on fourth ave.